Golgonooza

  If you still entered a view of Tibet (pre-1950) as a Shangri-la of peaceful monks fully engaged in pursuing enlightenment surrounded by a supportive, peaceful traditional culture, the harmony of 'Lost Horizons', you will emerge strongly disabused. If you imagine that Buddhism of all the main religious traditions is the most inured to manipulation by violence or the most likely to be conducive to peace, you too may have to reassess your views. There are plenty of opportunities, as Tibet's history unfolds, to encounter warrior monks engaging in a doctrinal argument with clubs and knives, monasteries of different suasions jostling for power with a liberal dose of poisoning, actual and suspected along the way. But if you wanted a balanced, intelligent, sympathetic but never credulous, history of Tibet, Sam Van Schaik's 'Tibet: A History' is excellent. I had bought it in the bookshop of the Rubin Museum in New York a couple of years ago but only got to reading it n...

  Innokenty awakes in a private hospital room without his memory. His attended by a single doctor and a single nurse without change. He has no memory neither of why he is hospitalized nor of his wider life. He is a man without history. With time and caring attention, his memory returns - fragments float up at first mainly of childhood. A train journey, a summer dacha, aspects of his parents care, a party where an elderly admiral counsels him to, 'Go Intrepidly' in exploring the host's house. Memories of the good, the particular, moments in time but seemingly not of time, suspended in presence. As his time in hospital proceeds, with the doctor giving only the most sparse of prompts, other memories will surface of more complex times, then more difficult and finally plain, simple degrading horror. For Innokenty comes of age in post-Revolutionary Russia, he finds himself, with his mother, sharing an apartment with a professor and his daughter and a worker at the local sausage f...